Today at her seminar Lucy quoted Brian Bloomfield on the boundaries that the use of a technological system can create for thought. The system in question is in the UK National Health Service, but the point is very relevant to social software (such as weblogs and wikis):

Once we had embarked upon the journey afforded us by the system, only a certain terrain was open to inspection; we could debate the the features of that terrain as made visible through the menus, records, and displays of the information system, but we could not switch the machine off and debate alternative landscapes; we could zoom in on details down to the level of records pertaining to individual treatment regimes for a given patient, or pull back and purview the architecture of the database as a whole, but we could not escape the boundaries implicitly defined by using the system.

See (Bloomfield 1991, p. 717).

I’m posting from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. My pick from this morning was the phrase ‘drying out’ from a talk by Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger from Ivrea: the young Filippino women whose SMS traffic was the focus of the Ivrea study had coined this phrase to refer to lukewarm response to persons the group no longer wanted to hang out with.

Drying out connects to a question I’ve wanted to ask Reid Hoffman, who designed the professional networking service LinkedIn, especially after watching the streaming video of a talk he gave at Stanford. Here’s the leader to my question:

In LinkedIn search results people are ranked according to their number of connections. The impression is: the more connections a person has, the more social capital she possesses. Clearly this motivates some people to go out of their way to climb up the ladder. It is a game of growing one’s list of contacts, a perpetual pile-up race to maintain one’s position in the ranking.

Now, relating LinkedIn’s encouragement of such behavior to sociological theorizing about the dynamics of social capital is the point of my question. When studying immigrant communities, World Bank sociologist Michael Woolcock observed that people didn’t grow their networks in a linear fashion. Instead, after a certain saturation point, to move ahead in their lives and enter new spheres of interaction, people had to break the bonds with their existing networks. This was often a painful experience. In Filippino lingo, people had to dry out their old friends to make new ones. The image is one of cyclical renewal of a limited network of meaningful contacts rather than linear growth of an ever-growing Rolodex of futilities.

So my question is this: Should Woolcock be right, and should the same LinkedIn users who now spend their energy growing their networks one day want to do the opposite, and get rid of their excess contacts, how might they dry out these “friends” gracefully?

Dvora Yanow recently quoted a study from the 1970s according to which only 7% of face-to-face communication is verbal (some claim the percentage is around 10). In online interaction, such as the sending and receiveing of social network-service invitations, the ‘rich’ embodied expressions and gestures have to be inferred from ‘poor’ codified information (e.g. tickboxes and a few lines of text explanation). The forced codification that such invitations require has annoyed even the most prolific of the online textual expressionists.

Social sofware developers appear to be grappling with the broad issue of codifying embodied knowledge into computer-readable ‘information’ on many fronts (annotating photos, simplifying moblogging, FOAF… the list goes on). Much of this very interesting work is characterised by a strong epistemological buy-in to the cybernetic worldview formalized by Shannon and Wiener, according to which the world is made of definite entities and ‘information’ can be abstracted from its material embodiment.

A set of critical analyses of this worldview and its practices also exists. Its range includes interesting work by Brian Bloomfield on the assumptions of inscriptions like requirements analyses, Lucy Suchman on situatedness, Geoff Bowker on the cybernetic concept of information, and Leigh Star on classification, only to name a few. Chuck and Candy Goodwin’s work at UCLA is particularly striking in its visuality. In Chuck’s words, meaning is enacted by way of ‘an ecology of sign systems that includes not only talk, but also a range of different kinds of displays made by the body, and structure in the environment.‘

A welcome stab at the lacklustre ROI vs. Strategic Fit dichotomy that motivates many “theories” of corporate venturing: “The Future of Corporate Venturing” by Andrew Campbell et al. in the recent MIT Sloan Management Review. They distinguish four venturing strategies: ecosystem venturing, innovation venturing, harvest venturing and private-equity venturing. Sine qua non, venturing attempts to grow a new billion-dollar leg outside the core business always crash in flames because they lead to endless strategy-changing (i.e. lack of strategy). Instead, companies should ascetically practice the venturing strategy that leverages their market position and assets: thy perseverance shall be rewarded…

For a few years now, socially-minded tinkerers have been building various systems for locating friends in bars. The most popular approach to solving this problem technically has been to dump the required computation about where you are to the user (see Imahima and Dodgeball, for instance). The problem is that to shout “Here I am!” users have to learn to input the commands, which is a bit clumsy even on i-mode phones. Another approach has been to use GPS or cellular positioning, but even where the technology is available, it’s not precise enough. A third way is the check-in/check-out approach, where some piece of technology (usually a low-cost card-swiper, infrared beacon, or RFID reader) is installed in the physical setting and users carry some sort of ID tags. There the problem is the cost and scalability. When building the Aula space for instance, we wanted for there to be a graceful way to let other members know when you’re there. After months of negotiations with the building management, wiring the door locks, and scavenging hardware, we managed to get the RFID-based Hunaja system working. But transferring the system to other premises was too costly, and so we had to shut Hunaja down when Aula left that space. The fourth and most recent solution is to do the tracking with WiFi or Bluetooth, although users then need an expensive terminal. Even if no one has quite figured it out yet, there might be a niche for a business model here, because (some) proprietors are willing to pay to attract a community of regulars, and (some) people will pay to publish their whereabouts to their small worlds when they’re out in town. (Although for sure it does have its problems, like stalking.)

Cory Doctorow writes: “The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy.” I’m reading Carlota Perez’s “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,” where she argues that every 50 years or so capitalism undergoes technological revolutions (sort of like the Kondratiev long waves) that go: technological revolution—financial bubble—collapse—golden age—political unrest. ICT:s were the 5th technological revolution, and if Perez is right we should now be in an important turning point of “institutional adjustment”. If the adjustment is successful, Perez says it will lead to a golden age period of full employment, comfortable profits and all the good stuff, although inevitably people’s expectations will grow too high and lead to frustration and protests. Although the emphasis is on the financial side, her analysis is rich and interesting.

Well, I’m back in Lancaster after a really strange christmas vacation in Cuba, which felt like a leftover chunk of soviet russia lost in the Caribbean. “Matkailu avartaa”—traveling opens the mind—goes a Finnish saying. Not only to the faraway things, but also to those subtle discrepancies in one’s home environment that normally go unnoticed. Like how annoying it is to search for a decent place in Helsinki to log on and do email. Just as annoying as in Havana, not to mention Lancaster where the café by the castle just shut. The spots keep changing. How to keep track?

Tom Coates notes that our everyday multitasking hassles may be killing off creativity. These thoughts are part of his commentary on the excellent NYT article about iPod and the process of its creation at Apple, which according to the article took only 6-9 months. Tom writes:

The process [of creating the iPod at Apple] seems to me to have been successful in producing something coherent and clean almost because of its brevity. In my experience, three months is about as long as you can reliably expect any individual person to care about their part of the project more than they care about anything else—even if they’re given total free space not to have to think about anything else (multi-tasking is the evil enemy of creativity in my opinion). Only clear delineations between stages in a project (and strong management over those transitions) can really help maintain people’s levels of constructive engagement if you need a project to go any longer.

I agree with Tom that even though multitasking cuts the creative process short, full personal devotion to a single task is always temporary. Tom’s thoughts also made me wonder, is there due appreciation of transitions between exploratory multitasking and focused concentration in companies? My feeling is that those who manage innovation should encourage their people to make such transitions—meaning really moving physically—from a focused setting to a multitasking setting and back again. (These musings link to some other thoughts about “critical transitions”).

Today I went to hear the “grand old” sociologist Zygmunt Bauman speak in Lancaster. He’s got a new book out: Liquid Love. Personally for me it was amazing to see Bauman IRL, with his crazy white hair and the characteristic pipe (if I’m not mistaken he’s now 78).
– He argued that social bonds are the most perplexing question of our time. They are necessary enablers but simultaneously limiting: “Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; the higher the fence the greener the grass.”
– With technology, especially the mobile phone, people are networked, meaning they can make an initiative towards anyone and also discontinue a relationship without actually encountering the other person. The essence of a network is that you can connect to many points and also disconnect from them at will.
– Electronic communication increases travel because it’s safer to move from one set of local relationships to another when one can stay networked to all places in principle.
– He spoke of SDCs (semi-detached couples) who share the fun moments but stay detached enough to avoid complex emotional matters. Only with texting and email has such kind of togetherness become practical to handle.
– Top-pocket relationships are carried along like a handkerchief in the top pocket, taken out when required and put away whenever it’s not proper to display them.
– Nowadays it’s possible to choose how one behaves with others (does one adopt a traditional approach or the top-pocket approach) but if children lose the skills and ability to relate to others in the traditional way, top-pocket may become the expected way to manage relationships.
I walked home thinking there’s got to be room in this world for relationships that are neither modeled on the postwar marriage nor on semi-detachment…

A few weeks ago I went to hear Donna Haraway speak about the yet-unpublished Companion Species Manifesto at Lancaster. Here’s a video clip (not from that lecture) where she talks about the way we as humans construct ourselves in relation to, and along with, non-humans. In her words, “The kind of sociality that joins humans and machines is a sociality that constitutes both (…) Who humans are ontologically is constituted out of that relationality. (…) There is not some pre-existing anthropomorphic point of view from which vision proceeds to the world (…) Interactions between humans and machines have produced both. It is not humans that produce machines in some unilateral way. The arrow does not move one way, even in the areas of direct human invention.”